Description: In December 2009, the Obama administration directed federal agencies and departments to implement "principles of transparency, participation and collaboration," and provided deadlines for making government information available online. At the same time, citizens and journalists are developing new technologies to manage and analyze the exponential increase in data about our civic lives available from governmental and other sources. What new ways of gathering and presenting information are evolving from this nexus of government openness and digital connectedness?

Speakers Linda Fantin and Ellen Miller, explore this and related questions by providing details on their respective projects.

Through anecdotes and demonstrations, Linda Fantin of Public Insight Journalism suggests that maintaining a continuous relationship with community is the best way to get stories you weren't expecting to get. The power of deep community engagement is evident when a major story breaks, as the networks of sources and newsrooms can be tapped at a moments notice.

Ellen Miller describes the work the Sunlight Foundation-a relatively new NGO- whose main mission is to use the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She sees Sunlight redefining the meaning of public information as "government in real time.". Detailing the work of the Foundation, Miller explains the work in five areas, data digitization, advocacy, tools, engagement and media production.

About the Speaker(s): Ellen S. Miller is the co"founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington"based, non"partisan non"profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She is the founder of two other prominent Washington"based organizations in the field of money and politics -- the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign -- and a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics. Her experience as a Washington advocate for more than 35 years spans the worlds of non"profit advocacy, grassroots activism and journalism. Ms. Miller also served as Deputy Director of Campaign for America's Future, the publisher of TomPaine.com and a senior fellow at The American Prospect. She spent nearly a decade working on Capitol Hill. She blogs regularly at SunlightFoundation.com.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: As old media die, new forms are emerging, but it's not clear they will serve such vital civic functions as "helping people form publics," as Pat Aufderheide puts it. These panelists point to promising experiments in "Public Media 2.0," but caution that new media are not guaranteed to shore up democracy or invigorate public culture.

After two years of research, Jessica Clark has reframed the notion of public media as "outlets that provide context/content that allows publics to form around shared issues without political or corporate interference." Instead of a centralized producer (old media), user"producers collaborate, forming networks with the use of digital tools. Some novel ventures that "break out of the old zones:" cell phone reporting in forbidden areas of war"torn Gaza, and streaming iPhone feeds of local news from U.S. cities.

Ellen Hume faults traditional journalism to some degree for its own demise, because it did not "connect the dots between news and action." It stirred up emotions with stories but didn't give people "a place to go" with their passion. In contrast, new civic medium SeeClickFix.com enables the public to report a problem in a community (from potholes to graffiti), spurring government response. HeroReports.org encourages people to report instances of kindness. Says Hume, "These new media offer enormous opportunity for creativity, and unleash the ability to participate in public." But we haven't yet entered the era of full media literacy, where people become "part of the public, rather than cruising through."

Persephone Miel has been searching for "all that democracy we were supposed to get." In spite of the proliferation of new types of reporting media, including news aggregator, author" and audience"driven web sites, Miel believes the "old media model still does unique things for us." As traditional journalism fades, there's no new media replacement yet for its "editorial intelligence," its persistent, watchdog functions. Miel sees no evidence that "the volunteer energy of the blogosphere" will step into these roles. She notes several attempts at hybrid journalism forms: websites Spot.us, a nonprofit project for community"funded reporting; Global Voices, where correspondents in developing nations send out web dispatches; and Town Meeting 2009, a New Hampshire public radio web venture that reported on local governments' budget process.

On the technology front, Dean Jansen has developed a free open source HD video player, Miro, so people don't have to go through proprietary gateways or load specialized software to access web video content. He hopes to swell the ranks of user"producers in a more inclusive, participatory webspace.
Jake Shapiro's public radio exchange, PRX.org, invites independent radio producers to connect with local public radio stations through his aggregating site. Citing the "current collapse of traditional forms," particularly public television, Shapiro hopes to reconfigure public broadcasting. He says his marketplace enables content creators to find an audience, receive royalties from interested public radio buyers, create social networks, and potentially find alternative channels of distribution via podcasting.

About the Speaker(s): Pat Aufderheide is the author of several books including Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (2007), The Daily Planet (2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (1999). She has been a Fulbright and John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival. She received a career achievement award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: New technology may have permanently changed U.S. politics and campaigning. These panelists, who have both observed and driven this change, attest to how truly transformative the 2008 presidential election turned out to be.

Four million more 18"29 year olds voted in 2008 than in 2004, says Ian Rowe, and nearly 70% of these voted for Obama. Rowe's convinced this enormous leap in voters, and their sharp preference for one candidate, "is due to the use of new media." He credits the Obama campaign's extraordinary mastery of both message and delivery, citing a "centralized and decentralized process; the idea that everyone had part"ownership of the brand." The campaign reached young people via cellphone, Twitter, and Facebook. He notes Obama's website, FighttheSmears.com, which battled scurrilous internet rumors. Users "became an ally to preserve and protect his brand," says Rowe. But none of this would have been effective if Obama had not purveyed such a "phenomenal and consistent message," which involved drawing on his audience for ideas and direction. This represents "a new kind of governance about bringing you into the process."

Marc Ambinder believes that the 2004 and 2008 campaigns were successful because "they both managed to use tried and tested old media marketing techniques and merge them with technology." While lagging in resources and technique four years ago, the Democrats this time round were fueled by Obama's massive $630 million war"chest. The end result was an email database of around 10 million people, which they put to use in social networks like Facebook. Ambinder also recalls a fascinating effort using old and new media in South Carolina, where the Obama campaign worried about gaining votes among older African" American women. Campaign staff recorded some of Michelle Obama's speeches on the subject, and sent volunteers with DVDs and VHS tapes of her talks to beauty parlors. "Volunteers spent tens of thousands of hoursloosening resistance." Then when polls opened, data warehouses on some of these voters allowed campaigners to determine who hadn't yet voted, and target them with phone calls and offers of a ride.

GOP technology guru Cyrus Krohn finds the amount of information his party has on voters kind of scary. He describes how third party data mining groups helped the Republican National Committee match information from a voter file with a voter's "public profile on a social network." This proved a "goldmine" for targeting purposes. But "technology is a commodity," says Krohn, and "it's the cachet and persona of a candidate that will drive the use of it." Krohn was "daunted by the amount of user"generated contentin support of Obama." The piece of media that created the most buzz around McCain was the video "McCain Girls," which turned out to be the product of the liberal Huffington Post. Such is the impact of technology that Krohn has found himself helping every RNC division think about how to deploy it. Anyone looking for campaign work should be proficient in C++ and Java, recommends Krohn.

About the Speaker(s): Ian V. Rowe oversees MTV's on"air and off"air "pro"social" campaigns that build awareness of issues of importance to the MTV audience, and that encourage young people to take action to address those issues. This includes Choose or Lose 2004, the campaign designed to engage and inform young people and encourage them to register and vote in the last presidential election.

In May 2005, Rowe's team launched think MTV, a new pro"social initiative that aims to inform and empower young people on the domestic and global issues that matter to them most. The think MTV section of MTV.com will serve as a comprehensive online resource for young people to get more information about issues of concern and ways to get involved locally and globally.

Prior to MTV, Ian was the Director of Strategy and Performance Measurement for USA Freedom Corps at the White House, the President's initiative on volunteer service. Rowe was also founder and President of Third Millennium Media, a media consulting business. He spent two years at Teach For America and holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a degree in Computer Science Engineering from Cornell University.
Marc Ambinder spent a year and a half at the Hotline, where he was the editor of "Hotline On Call," a pathbreaking political news blog. He spent four years in the ABC News Political Unit as a reporter, researcher and a field producer, and was one of the founders of ABC's "The Note." At the Atlantic, Ambinder writes an award"winning daily political blog and contributes to the magazine. He is also a contributing editor to National Journal. In late 2007, he was named chief political consultant to CBS News. He's a 2001 graduate of Harvard and lives in Washington, D.C.
Cyrus Krohn previously served as director of Yahoo News. Before that he was publisher of Slate.com. He was also worked as a producer for CNN, and as an intern at the White House.

Krohn graduated from Lynchburg College in 1993.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: It's Day 95 in MIT's 150 days of sesquicentennial celebration, and all thoughts turn to the evolution of computer science and MIT's pivotal role in that history. As Victor Zue puts it so succinctly, "Computers sure have changed." They are even invading biology, and President Hockfield (who is also a Professor of Neuroscience) sees this history as another branch in the tradition, initiated by William Barton Rogers, of education bringing the "useful arts" (or as we now say, technology) to bear on the economic development of the United States.

Tom Leighton asserts that "To say computers are transforming everything is an understatement." Leighton offers a brief lesson in theoretical computer science, defining an algorithm through the example of searching for the prime factors of a given number N, and identifying the key follow"up questions: Can you prove it works? How long does it take? How good is it? Then the big question: Does theoretical computer science matter? Leighton cites some powerful examples of the field's impact on our lives, from encryption to Google's page"rank algorithm to the content delivery system of Akamai Technologies (which he co"founded in 1998).

Ed Lazowska asks a very different question: What four important events happened in 1969? If you guess the landing on the moon, the Woodstock festival, or the Mets winning the World Series, you're right but no cigar: the most important event was the first data transmission over the ARPANet, forerunner of the Internet. Since then, relentless innovation has produced computer systems that make possible digital media, mobility, search _ and set the stage for the next generation of smarts, i.e., computers embodied in our homes, cars, healthcare, and in a sense, ourselves, via crowd"sourcing. In all this, even when viewed from the "left coast," MIT's role continues to be central.

But the rock star of this symposium is actually IBM's Jeopardy"winning Watson, whose glowing blue countenance beams in all three talks. Patrick Winston takes off from Watson to look for the beginning of artificial intelligence, and after a few hops backward through the late 20th century, arrives at Aristotle and then Neanderthals and the paintings at Lascaux. The modern progenitors of artificial intelligence, whom Winston honors one"by"one in a digital photo gallery, include Marvin Minsky (for focusing on human cognition), Roger Schank (storytelling), and David Marr (layers of explanation).

Where is artificial intelligence headed? Winston is working on a "trinity of strong hypotheses" _ about story, perception, and social interaction _ and he promises to report on the success of this way forward at the MIT bicentennial celebration.

About the Speaker(s): Victor Zue is the first holder of the Delta Electronics Chair endowed for senior researchers. His main research interest is in the development of spoken language interfaces to make human/computer interactions easier and more natural, and he has taught many courses and lectured extensively on this subject. Prior to 2001, he headed the Spoken Language Systems Group, which has pioneered the development of many systems that enable a user to interact with computers using multiple spoken languages (English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Spanish).

Outside of MIT, Zue has consulted for many multinational corporations, and he has served on many planning, advisory, and review committees for the US Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Science and Engineering. In 1990, he became a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America. In 1999, he received the DARPA Sustained Excellence Award. In 2002, he received the Speech Technology Magazine's inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2004, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.

Description: Amy Bruckman finds the accomplishments of such online collaborations as Wikipedia, Apache and Firefox "nothing less than astounding," and is both eagerly seeking and hoping to foster the next creative group Internet sensation.

In her lab's empirical studies, Bruckman has dissected different types of ensemble internet projects. She describes them as "naturally occurring constructionist learning environments," where individuals bring "who they are to the process of making meaning," and receive from their community technical and emotional support. This stuff matters, she says, because "people working together can create mind"bogglingly interesting stuff," not least because the most inclusive projects reflect the values of all their contributors.

Bruckman identifies some typical collaborative modes, including the remix (adapting someone else's project); the benevolent dictatorship (as in open"source software, where a leader decides what contributors may add to the project); and open"content publishing, in which participants work in parallel checking one another's work. She remarks that the last type of collaboration can prove surprisingly efficient and accurate. A Wikipedia entry that evolved in the first 100 hours after Japan's recent earthquake contained 2900 edits made by 761 people. Online collaborations often follow a project's "narrative" structure, says Bruckman, so people may work in parallel; or by continuation (with pieces handed off sequentially to the next person); or by collection, with a leader gathering the parts into a whole.

Some factors in online communities are more likely to encourage participation than others, such as clearly defined reciprocity (if I help, you help me in return); or that contributions are clearly attributed to an individual, and may improve that person's reputation. Bruckman is creating a suite of tools called Pipeline that attempts to enumerate the best practices of online collaboration to help digital producers kick start their own creative communities. She is certain that projects featuring "broad, diverse participation" will always "surprise you with intelligence and creativity," if people get the right tools and social context for making that happen.

About the Speaker(s): Amy Bruckman is a member of the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability (GVU) Center at Georgia Tech. She received her Ph.D. from the Epistemology and Learning Group at the MIT Media Lab in 1997, and her B.A. in physics from Harvard University in 1987. She does research on online communities and education, and is the founder of the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group.

Bruckman is also a member of Georgia Computes!, an NSF Broadening Participation in Computing Alliance. She co"directs Georgia Tech's initiative in Web Science.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, The MIT Education Arcade

Description: Although these three speakers travel in quite disparate worlds -- natural language processing, mechanics of tiny organisms, and violent cosmic events -- they convey a comparably infectious enthusiasm for their research.

In the early days of artificial intelligence, "people had the na've idea that if you took a computer, and fed it with enough human knowledge, it could eventually understand human language," relates Regina Barzilay. In the 1990s, after this "spectacular failure" in methodology, a new approach evolved: training a machine to infer knowledge from piles of data. Some successes are already in evidence (IBM's chess" and Jeopardy"playing programs). Barzilay wants to move this learning further, toward "grounding interpretation of language in the real world." She describes algorithms that could take over the often exasperating grunt work of installing new Windows software on computers, by reading common instructions and executing the actions. Her system learns to map words with increasing accuracy by using feedback. She is also investigating how to get a machine to understand and act in a much more complex environment, such as the Civilization computer game. Using simulations, her algorithms make predictions about the best possible moves (e.g., invade another nation), and can even absorb instructions from the game's manual, which should make the system "good enough to play against humans." Her ultimate goal: "enabling computers to function competently in a world rich in unstructured information."

For tiny organisms in a fluid environment, a key challenges is viscosity, says Anette Hosoi . In particular, Hosoi focuses on eukaryotic cells with spherical heads attacked to flexible tails. Remarkably, the diameters of these tails are the same across all species -- between 250"400 nanometers. Whether a hair in a lung, or a cell in green algae, these tails are all made of microtubule structures that can slide and bend in similar ways. By analyzing these common properties, Hosoi can predict optimal morphology and kinematics of comparable tailed microorganisms. For instance, analyzing sperm cells, Hosoi's team determined that the best ratio of tail to head for swimming efficiency is 12 _ and not just for sperm. "I don't care what the species is, what it's made out of, the tail should be 12 times as long as the headGetting something as clean as that is very exciting!" One outlier in the study: the Bandicoot, whose sperm's fat tail did not share the same radius as all the others. This kind of optimization research, says Hosoi, can only improve, as the computational costs of analyzing vast repositories of biological data continue to drop. When you begin to understand underlying principles in biological structures, she says, "you can move on to inform engineering designs."

Nergis Mavalvala takes her audience "to a slightly uncomfortable side of the universe, warped and violent." She searches the cosmos using "a completely new messenger -- gravitational waves that travel to us from distant sources." Mavalvala credits Einstein (by way of Newton) for first proposing these waves. He developed a picture of space and time "as a fabric" that can be dented by massive objects, exerting a gravitational pull. Massive objects bouncing around or vibrating caused "ripples of space time itself" -- hence gravitational waves. To produce these waves, says Mavalvala, you need lots of mass and rapid acceleration, explosions and collisions _ produced by compact stars slamming together, merging black holes, and the conditions that immediately followed the Big Bang. Using special detectors (laser interferometers), Mavalvala has been trying to detect gravitational waves. The first measurements taken by these detectors found a gamma ray burst explosion, but no gravitational waves. A next"generation detector is on the way that makes it possible to "listen to more distant sounds," but Mavalvala notes that at this level of "exquisite measurement," you pay the price of "quantum uncertainty." However, she is certain the elusive gravitational wave will finally be captured, and "we will be testing general relativity: the first direct observation of ripples of space"time."

About the Speaker(s): In addition to her other appointments, Penny Chisholm currently serves as co"director of Terrascope, an MIT learning community for freshmen. She is also a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. From 1988"1995, she served as the MIT Director of the MIT/Woods Hole Joint Program in Oceanography.

Chisholm received the 2005 Huntsman Award for Excellence in Marine Science, and is a Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Investigator in Marine Science. She has published papers in PNAS and Nature. She received her Ph.D. in Biology in 1974 from S.U.N.Y. Albany.

Description: An unmistakable glow of nostalgia rises from this reunion of "five of the founding fathers of modern finance," in the words of Andrew Lo. The speakers reminisce about their start in economics, and their professional lives at MIT, a decades"long era of intense collaboration and creativity that both transformed the academic field and the landscape of real"world finance.

This group of scholars believes they owe much to luck in finding their lives in financial economics. A sympathetic Stanford professor directed Stewart C. Myers to the right doctoral program, at precisely the moment when "big ideas were flowering" in the discipline: efficient markets, agency costs, and most important to Myers, new theories about valuation. A call came from MIT to join the faculty, and Myers began his critical work around the principles of corporate finance, which turned out to have great practical applications. Says Myers, "It's really good to go out in the world now and talk to CFOs actually using this stuff."

Raised in a Canadian family that traded in gold, Myron Scholes was interested in "how things were valued," but it was a summer job as a computer programmer for university researchers that set his career path. Assisting Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller, Scholes found infectious their "joy of getting results, and asking the next questions." He came to MIT in 1968, and became fascinated with options, insurance and distributions of portfolios. He met Fischer Black his first summer, which led to the first of many intellectually profitable partnerships, some of which continue to this day.

Among other twists of fate, a switch in grad school from applied mathematics to economics, and the good sense of MIT to offer him a fellowship (following rejections by eight other schools) brought Robert Merton to Cambridge. After taking Paul Samuelson's mathematical economics course, "the rest was history," says Merton. "I lived in his office from the end of that class on." He was hired at graduation by the Sloan School, and joined a "very small group, with no senior faculty. It was like all these kids and nobody to look after them." They designed courses, did research, "had a blast. The research flowed so fast for us and the students; there was not enough time to do it all. That doesn't happen often." Merton's work was also stimulated by the economic catastrophes of the 1970s, which fed an intense drive to put research around better markets mechanisms into practice.

"I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a professor, and economics seemed special," says John C. Cox. In the mid"1970s, the pathbreaking work of Merton, Black, and Scholes offered "plenty of low"lying plums to be picked in the orchard. It seemed like a golden age for capital market theory, so much to do." The group he joined at MIT has evolved, and the programs expanded, but Cox "has enjoyed every minute" of the past 30 years.

Stephen A. Ross discovered he loved a certain kind of math while taking a course in game theory and linear programming to fulfill his Caltech humanities requirement. But it wasn't until he attended a mathematical economics seminar focused on MIT work that he realized he was interested in finance. "It was the most fascinating stuff I'd ever heard." He especially liked the "science" of it, "that theory and data had to relate in some way."

Ross defends financial engineering and its applications in the wake of the financial crisis. "Derivatives did what they were supposed to do. They spread the risk. The problem is the people who took on the risk didn't like the fact they lost money." Scholes wonders about rules that "let 1.5 million contracts go due in the derivatives swap market instantaneously for settlement. It sounds nuts to me." Says Myers, "It's true that modern finance is a powerful tool and can be misused, but it's not a reason to discard the tool. It's a reason to use it better."

He has published numerous articles in finance and economics journals, and is a co"author of The Econometrics of Financial Markets and A Non"Random Walk Down Wall Street, and author of Hedge Funds: An Analytic Perspective. He is currently an associate editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Portfolio Management, the Journal of Computational Finance, and Statistica Sinica.

Lo is a former governor of the Boston Stock Exchange, and currently a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a member of the NASD's Economic Advisory Board, and founder and chief scientific officer of AlphaSimplex Group, LLC, a quantitative investment management company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lo received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1984, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School 1984 to 1988.

Host(s): Office of the President, MIT150 Inventional Wisdom

]]>
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 17:57:19 -0500http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16733-the-evolution-of-financial-technology
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16733-the-evolution-of-financial-technology
The Evolution of Financial Technology
MIT World — special events and lectures Crowds and Clouds: Data, Sheep, and Collaboration in the Works of Aaron Koblin
Aaron Koblin, Abramowitz Artist in Residence, MIT

Description: Where others see just data points and fodder for bar graphs, Aaron Koblin visualizes dynamic systems where information assumes forms both abstract and familiar. In this talk, Koblin shares recent projects that meld statistical science and art to convey a really big picture, while often inviting the viewer to partake in a more personal experience.

Koblin explores those "interesting traces" left after humans interact with each other and with computers -- what he calls "data trails." One work, Flight Patterns, depicts the flow of air traffic over North America in a 24"hour period. The east and west coasts light up in sequence, and lines shoot out of great cities in swarms at busy times of day, like brain scans showing bursts of activity among neural centers.

Koblin is not simply fascinated by a bird's"eye view of human networks. In the Sheep Market, he seeks to "juxtapose the humanity of an individual process with a gigantic, alienated system." With the help of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, software that allows online users to contribute a tiny part of a large project for very little compensation, Koblin collected thousands of drawings of "a sheep facing left." The result is a black and white mosaic of 10,000 Lilliputian animals, each one of which when selected emerges as an individual drawing. (Participants were paid two cents a head). Similarly, in Ten Thousand Cents, online participants drew a tiny piece of a $100 bill (for a penny). The collage, "the largest distributed forgery project on the planet," looks remarkably like the real thing when viewed from afar, but says Koblin, "if you drill in, you can see smiley faces, stippling, and sketching" -- a wild variety of artistic styles. He has tested the crowd"sourcing concept with audio as well, creating a version of "Daisy Bell" for 2,000 sampled voices, which "sounds like a pack of gremlins," or HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey on steroids.

Koblin's work maps comfortably onto the music video world. His tribute to Johnny Cash features a multitude of drawings by fans, and he collaborated on a "music video without video" for Radiohead that employed laser scanners and light patterns. Koblin wants to marshal data, as well as the collective intelligence of the Internet, to create a meaningful experience on a human scale. "I nerd out on a lot of this technology stuff," Koblin admits, but he also suggests there is no point to art without "emotional resonance."

About the Speaker(s): Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns. Koblin's work has been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation's first place award for science visualization and his art is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Koblin received his M.F.A. from the Department of Design|Media Arts at UCLA and his B.A. in Electronic Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Utilizing a background in the computer game industry, he led a course in game design for the web at UCLA and has been working with data driven projects as a designer, artist and researcher.

Description: While these panelists diverge on the precise metaphor -- 'picking through a minefield,' 'hacking through the underbrush,' 'navigating uncharted waters' -- they all agree that the web poses novel dilemmas and hazards for truth"seeking and speaking citizens.

First the good news: "There was a conscious decision by Congress to give online space some breathing room," says David Ardia, shielding website operators "who allow others to use their site to speak out" from liability for some published content. This has permitted the explosive rise of YouTube and blogging services that serve as platforms for the masses. On the other hand, copyright and other legal claims are being successfully prosecuted against website hosts and posters.

Ardia worries about the underreported phenomenon of citizen journalists who post on the web and find themselves "fighting an authority." There is "an extensive chilling effect," says Ardia "If you discover information that shows government corruption or puts powerful institutions on the defensive, you run the real risk of having them lawyer up, come after you, or put you in a position where you can't afford to stand up for your rights."

Another emerging issue: When web content is construed as invading privacy, legal suits arise that lead to a delicate dance between free speech and privacy. "Horrible things are said and done through the internet," says Ardia, "but overall the impact is far more beneficial than harmful. As we start to fix instances of bad conduct, we run a great riskof correcting one thing, but at the cost ofspeech that should be protected."

While the Obama Administration has pledged to make government more transparent, there is wild inconsistency in how federal, state and local governments make their work available. Daniel Schuman describes how some public authorities offer "giant data sets" lacking the kind of sophisticated formats that enable fruitful vetting. Congress members must post an earmarks request online, but Schuman says, "If you want to find it, good luck." And in certain areas, there is no web data at all: For access to congressional ethics information, someone must visit Capitol Hill in person at the right time, and copy pertinent pages. Schuman researched a "fantastic, sortable, downloadable" database describing the disbursement of Wall Street bailout money. The drawback: license provisions that permit the database owner "to pull back" the information, posing a major "impediment to people who want to use this information to talk about what's going on."

Another problem involves credentialing of online journalists. "Members of the civic media simply can't get in the door" of press galleries in some House and Committee meetings, and forget recording Supreme Court justices by cellphone or other electronic devices. "As a private citizen, it's hard and expensive to push back," says Schuman.
The Wikileaks disclosures are shaking up discussions of government transparency as well as those about online freedoms. Says Schuman, "It makes the political climate more difficult. Irresponsible journalism will need to be protected, and condemned when done in this kind of way." Moderator Micah Sifry sees an overreaction: "Leaks happen every day in Washington; secret information is out there all the timeNo one is prosecuted. It's the currency of information there." Ultimately, says Ardia, we want to "bring information together in a way that moves us from a glut of data to real knowledge, and hopefully to wisdom, to make better decisions as a society. We are moving in that direction. I'm optimistic."

About the Speaker(s): Micah L. Sifry launched Personal Democracy Forum, a daily website and annual conference on how technology is changing politics. He is also the editor of the group blog TechPresident, which focuses on how campaigns use the web.

Sifry also consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non"profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world. Current clients include the Sunlight Foundation, the Campaign for America's Future, and Air America.

From 1997 to 2006, he worked closely with Public Campaign, a non"profit, non"partisan organization focused on comprehensive campaign finance reform, as its senior analyst. Prior to that, Sifry was an editor and writer with The Nation magazine for 13 years.

He is the author or editor of four books, including Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), written with Nancy Watzman. He is also an adjunct professor of political science at City University of New York/Graduate Center.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: Although we are still far from the moment of singularity, or even Star Wars 'droids, we can anticipate robot colleagues in the near future, believes Seth Teller. He is developing 'situationally aware' machines to help out humans in those "unstructured environmentswhere we live, work and recreate."

Teller's goal is not "to solve the full AI problem," but to provide robot solutions to specific challenges. Whatever the project, the robot must successfully navigate a messy human world with appropriate sensor data, and interact with us on our terms, through speech and gestures, overcoming potential unease. "We are working with ways of creating natural interactions between humans and robots, paying attention to notions of human acceptance," says Teller.

The first venture Teller describes is an unmanned car, developed for a DARPA competition. Teller's team had to design a vehicle that could not only "see" around itself, but understand the rules and hazards urban driving. Teller shows video of the "Urban Challenge" finals, with his car waiting patiently at an intersection for another car to pull out _"no honking or obscenities," he notes. Someday, believes Teller, such a vehicle could help reduce U.S. driving fatalities, improve gas mileage and human productivity, and even replace thousands of military ground vehicles.

Teller has also been applying the principles of autonomous mobility to logistics in the form of an unmanned forklift for the military. Typical robotic forklifts function in indoor warehouses with smooth floors, uniform lighting, precise maps. Teller's challenge was to come up with a device the "military could set down in a patch of earth somewhere." This forklift robot is equipped not just with laser scanners to detect fixed or moving obstacles, but microphones, so it can stop if it hears a command or shouting. It also displays "text strings and color kinetic LEDs" to let people know where it is going.

Teller is applying this kind of machine intelligence to aid severely disabled people, with a motorized wheelchair that lets users navigate around an institutional setting, learning to map a space using verbal labels from a human trainer. A related assistive technology may offer blind people the possibility of greater independence and efficiency. Teller imagines a device that can "build up a persistent model of the wearer's surround," which could let a blind person know where she left her keys, or send out spoken or braille navigational instructions. Together, these projects point toward machine minds that can increasingly interpret human commands and needs, achieving "validation" from human supervisors and Teller hopes, "a gradual path toward autonomy."

About the Speaker(s): Seth Teller received a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley in 1992, focusing on accelerated rendering of complex architectural environments. After post"doctoral fellowships at the Computer Science Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Institute of Computer Science, and Princeton University's Computer Science Department, Teller joined MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Lab for Computer Science, and Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1994. (In 2004, the two labs merged into CSAIL, MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.)

At CSAIL, Teller heads the Robotics, Vision, and Sensor Networks group (RVSN), where his research focuses on enabling machines to become aware of their surroundings and interact naturally with people.

Description: Working with motors, sensors, sophisticated algorithms and fuzzy puppets, Cynthia Breazeal may finally realize one of childhood's fondest dreams: imaginary characters that assume a physical reality, and stories that leap from the page into three dimensions.

Virtual play can take a child only so far, suggests Breazeal, who was inspired by master movie puppeteer Stan Winston. They shared a vision of a "living, breathing droid" -- a fabricated creature that could exist off" as well as onscreen. Breazeal has refashioned this idea over the years to meet her evolving goals in artificial intelligence. She pioneered the area of social robotics and human"robot interaction, developing creatures that can actually learn from and work with people. More recently, as a mother of young children, Breazeal has turned her attention to how socially intelligent machines might offer children new forms of expression and better ways to play.

She designed a simple robot for preschoolers to decorate and costume, like a "Mr. Potatohead." Children constructed and participated in a story, finding "the physicality of the character compelling." Robots that make eye contact and recognizable gestures -- who appear to have a life of their own -- allow kids to improvise around stories "in a way that might not have happened if the stories sprang from a single mind." Her Media Lab group has also concocted the "Huggable," a teddy bear"like creature with sensors that allow it to react to human touch. This creature might be used someday by a grandparent, via the Internet, to read a story to a grandchild, or to help a child learn English as a second language.

Breazeal is passionate about energizing "kids sitting on their butts watching shows" to become actors in their own stories. She envisions a "mixed reality" medium, enabled by computer, where surfaces are digitally paintable. A kid"colored, computer"based character could interact with its creator in a pirate story, or a child could "cut and paste a program in one place" and lay it down somewhere else. "It's all about how to get what's in the mind of a child out in the world so others can riff on it and animate it." Breazeal believes that "we don't know what the world's going to look like 5"10 years from now," so kids must be armed not just with solid cognitive skills, but creative, collaborative and tactile abilities. Richer play, enabled by robotics and other digital technology, suggests Breazeal, will help prepare children for this rapidly changing world.

About the Speaker(s): Cynthia Breazeal directs the Media Lab's Personal Robots group. She was previously a postdoctoral associate at MIT's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. Breazeal is particularly interested in developing creature"like technologies that exhibit social commonsense and engage people in familiar human terms. Kismet, her anthropomorphic robotic head, has been featured in international media and is the subject of her book Designing Sociable Robots, published by the MIT Press. She continues to develop anthropomorphic robots as part of her ongoing work of building artificial systems that learn from and interact with people in an intelligent, life"like, and sociable manner.

Breazeal earned Sc.D. and M.S. degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, and a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, The MIT Education Arcade

]]>
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:46:36 -0500http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16688-innovation-spotlight-bringing-children-s-media-off-the-screen
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16688-innovation-spotlight-bringing-children-s-media-off-the-screen
Innovation Spotlight: Bringing Children's Media off the Screen
MIT World — special events and lectures Toying with Transmedia: The Future of Entertainment is Child's Play
Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California;

Description: In what could be the ultimate twist on Toy Story, Henry Jenkins suggests that action figures -- those Star Wars and Masters of the Universe dolls from a few decades ago -- had the power to spark human creativity and transcend their original function. Jenkins argues such toys served children and young adults as "authoring tools" in stories that grew increasingly elaborate and technologically sophisticated over the years, spawning new kinds of play in our own time.

In a lecture spiced with stills and video, Jenkins demonstrates that early generations of action figures, such as movie, cartoon, and cereal box characters, inspired a cohort of player "creators," and helped shape the emergent phenomenon of transmedia. This, describes Jenkins, is a storytelling process "where integral elements of a fiction are dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience."

Transmedia is not about "dumbing down popular culture," Jenkins says. It involves complex mythologies that kids and adults can throw themselves into, with large casts of vivid characters in complex plots rivaling those in Russian novels. Transmedia storytelling also encourages children to "play out different fantasies," try out roles, and begin to construct their own identities. Storm trooper marshmallows in Star Wars cereal do not qualify, he warns, since branding alone does not unleash storytelling juices or encourage user immersion.

Jenkins claims that contemporary transmedia are "produced by the generation that grew up playing He"Man for the generation that is growing up playing Pok_mon." But this popular culture phenomenon owes much to a rich history of children's literature with offshoots, he notes. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland triggered a series of book variations soon after its publication. L. Frank Baum wrote not one but many books about Oz, produced stage plays and movies, and lectured widely as "the royal geographer of Oz," says Jenkins. J.R.R. Tolkien devised an encyclopedically detailed mythical world for which he wrote songs. More recently, Walt Disney, "the father of modern mass media," says Jenkins, figured out how to bring great children's stories -- and such characters as Alice, assorted princesses, Mickey -- into the common playspaces of his amusement parks, films, TV and ice shows.

Just as Masters of the Universe and Star Wars toys, comic books and TV franchises helped shape the imaginations and culture of the generation that generated Game Boy (with its video games, anime, manga and trading cards), so, we may assume, will Pok_mon Pikachu figures and their fictional worlds inspire the next generation of transmedia producers. Expect these stories to show up on mobile phones and iPads, predicts Jenkins, where there is the most "potential for a multimedia experience." And don't be surprised to see "less geeky genres like sci fi and fantasy," and more adult genres such as historical fiction and comedy."

About the Speaker(s): Henry Jenkins joined USC from MIT, where he was Peter de Florez Professor in the Humanities. He directed MIT's Comparative Media Studies graduate degree program from 1993"2009, setting an innovative research agenda during a time of fundamental change in communication, journalism and entertainment.

As one of the first media scholars to chart the changing role of the audience in an environment of increasingly pervasive digital content, Jenkins has been at the forefront of understanding the effects of participatory media on society, politics and culture. His research gives key insights to the success of social"networking Web sites, networked computer games, online fan communities and other advocacy organizations, and emerging news media outlets.

Jenkins is recognized as a leading thinker in the effort to redefine the role of journalism in the digital age. Through parallels drawn between the consumption of pop culture and the processing of news information, he and his fellow researchers have identified new methods to encourage citizen engagement. Jenkins launched the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT to further explore these parallels.

He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture. His most recent book is Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide.

Jenkins has a B.A. in Political Science and Journalism from Georgia State University, a M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin"Madison.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, The MIT Education Arcade

]]>
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:43:46 -0500http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16686-toying-with-transmedia-the-future-of-entertainment-is-child-s-play
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16686-toying-with-transmedia-the-future-of-entertainment-is-child-s-play
Toying with Transmedia: The Future of Entertainment is Child's Play
MIT World — special events and lectures Capitalism 3.0: An Institutional Revolution In the Making
Otto Scharmer, Senior Lecturer

Description: C. Otto Scharmer points to what he calls a "blindspot" in
contemporary leadership research: the organization and management of
attention. He argues that there are different kinds of awareness or
attentiveness, that different problems require different qualities of or
approaches to awareness. Leaders who understand this can adapt
the structure of their awareness to optimize their approaches to
specific problems.

Scharmer claims we are
passing though a period requiring a new approach to awareness,
especially on the part of society's leaders. In these times,
leaders the need to navigate multiple deeply interlinked crises (such as
climate change, health care, and fiscal management), all of which
include a radical transformation in the relation of business to
society (which Scharmer calls "Capitalism 3.0"). He argues that
managing these crises requires a new target or focus for innovation:
"innovation at the level of the entire system" which requires a leadership that understands the nature of its
awareness, how that awareness is managed, and how it affects relations
with various collaborators and stakeholders.

One feature of this new understanding is a deliberate effort to "listen
outside the institutional bubble". A second is to set aside time to
"retreat and reflect". A third is prototyping various solutions,
"exploring by doing". He advocates recruiting collaborators in this
last effort, since the experience gained can inform and advance the
relationship.

However the most important feature of the awareness required by our
present situation is what Scharmer calls "generative listening"
-- listening through the filter of the space of future
possibilities. He calls this "leading by listening".

In a stunning example of this type of leadership flexibility, Scharmer shows a video clip of a concert in which
conductor Zubin Mehta visibly steps back and forth through
several leadership roles with regard to soloist Placido Domingo,
sometimes leading and sometimes allowing himself to be led by
the tenor. He directs his own lack of direction. Scharmer believes
that the subtlety and skill demonstrated by that kind of listening can
find applications in many other contexts.

About the Speaker(s): C. Otto Scharmer is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding chair of ELIAS (Emerging Leaders for Innovation Across Sectors), an initiative focused on developing profound system innovations for a more sustainable world. ELIAS links twenty leading global institutions across the three sectors of business, government, and civil society. He also is a visiting professor at the Center for Innovation and Knowledge Research, Helsinki School of Economics, and the founding chair of the Presencing Institute, a research initiative on developing and advancing social technologies for leading innovation and change.

Scharmer has consulted with global companies, international institutions, and cross"sector change initiatives in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He has co"designed and delivered award"winning leadership programs for client organizations including DaimlerChrysler, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Fujitsu.

He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges (2007) and Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations and Society (2005), co"authored with Peter Senge, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers.

Host(s): Sloan School of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

]]>
Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:55:23 -0500http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16653-capitalism-3-0-an-institutional-revolution-in-the-making
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/16653-capitalism-3-0-an-institutional-revolution-in-the-making
Capitalism 3.0: An Institutional Revolution In the Making
MIT World — special events and lectures Jenkins' Farewell -- Reflections on a Career at MIT (MIT Commnuications Forum)
Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California; ; William Uricchio, Professor of Comparative Media Studies;

Description: In conversation with William Uricchio, Henry Jenkins returns to reflect on his time at MIT and offers insights into MIT's culture, his new life at USC, and the state of digital cultures, new media and collective intelligence.

Jenkins shares that complex feeling of loving and hating MIT, at the same time and often within the course of one day. Providing his own insights into MIT's culture and the legacy of IHTFP, he looks back on a long career and the evolution of film and media studies into the Comparative Media Studies program we know today. He attributes his longevity at MIT to the inspiration provided by the students, and makes a strong case for the value of humanities education, while questions remain for some on how the humanities fit into an MIT education.

The reflection ends with Jenkins reading The Cat in the Hat-his annual salute to Dr. Seuss. This tradition, began 18 years ago, became a staple of IAP. Jenkins says he is reminded "how much it characterizes to me that creativity and imagination, which is so vital at MIT, and that we turn our back on at our own peril."

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: As the U.S. moves toward universal broadband access, look for increased government openness, new opportunities for civic engagement, and some dangers along the way, say these panelists.

While Chris Csikszentmihalyi acknowledges the civic potential of broadband, he does not believe it will be a simple matter for geographic communities to aggregate information and make collective decisions. The amount of data is growing, he says, but "even sophisticated people's understanding is not growing." He cites online crime mapping, which posts reports from police departments, but avoids white collar crime. "Are you offering information or facile statistics that look like red lining...?" He applauds online citizen journalism, but worries that legal protections applied to traditional media are not being extended to digital journalists. "We could have national broadband and things could go south quickly in terms of what kind of speech we can have."

"Government needs to play catch up," says Laurel Ruma, when it comes to utilizing digital technology. It's time to move away from the "social web," where we "vote on silly things on Facebook," to a civic web. This means that "digital natives who work until 7 p.m. and don't have time to get to public meetings... go online" to watch and comment on streamed videos of government meetings. This kind of technology can make citizen actions more effective, and government programs more cost"efficient. She believes open government applications should be available not just on computers and smart phones, which many people cannot afford, but in less expensive, freely available forms, such as information displays at city bus stops.

"A rush of new information" flows from open government directives, says John Wonderlich, which "has a broad systemic effect through society." New public data empowers all of "us to be better researchers, lobbyists, and journalists." Information that used to come with a price tag is now free. But since we are at an early stage in open and participatory government "where best practices are unclear," Wonderlich foresees a balancing act between laws dictating government's responsibilities, and guidelines to encourage certain behaviors. He also believes that public perceptions about government transparency may be based on false or outdated assumptions; data posted online may be inaccurate, so we "need to grow better cultural expectations."

Nick Grossman finds it exciting that "government services are potentially a gatewayto civic engagement." It's not "just about politics and government, but about the city and how we use it," he says. He likes being able to deploy his smart phone for real"time information on public transportation, and to provide feedback to operators, so he's "now having a conversation with those people." One risk of a rapid expansion of open government via broadband, believes Grossman, is that government will "try to do too much," building tools and providing services itself that might better come from the private sector. The flip side, he adds, is moving "too incrementally" and running the risk of spending too much money "in something that doesn't work well enough."

About the Speaker(s): Jerry Mechling focuses on the impacts of information and digital technologies on individual, organizational, and societal issues. He consults on these and other topics with public and private organizations locally and internationally. Most recently he was author of Eight Imperatives for Leaders in a Networked World and is presently finishing Leadership for a Cross"Boundary World.

A Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration and four"time winner of the Federal 100 Award, he was formerly a Fellow of the Institute of Politics, served as an aide to the Mayor and Assistant Administrator of the New York City Environmental Protection Administration, and served as Director of the Office of Management and Budget for the City of Boston. He received his B.A. in physical sciences from Harvard College and his M.P.A. and Ph.D. in economics and public affairs from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for Future Civic Media

Description: Few companies have endured such hardship, or risen to such heights in a brief span of time as Akamai Technologies. Paul Sagantells how he became the CEO of this young firm, and helped it survive and then flourish despite "unimaginable adversity."

Brought up in a Chicago newspaper family, Sagan trained for a life in journalism. He cut his teeth as a broadcast news producer and executive in the 1980s, and in the 1990s. He helped launch New York 1, a cable news network pioneering digital video technology, and later, an interactive TV project in Orlando that featured video on demand and customized newscasts. Over the years, says Sagan, he picked up critical lessons on running a business: Don't count on the permanence of any customer, job, or venture. He also "glimpsed the digital future," realizing that if "you married the interactivity and openness of the web with the bandwidth available from cableyou could change the way the internet worked."

In 1997, Sagan met a group of MIT computer scientists, including Tom Leighton and Danny Lewin, who had the "crazy, big idea" of applying mathematics to improve internet performance. Businesses frustrated with breakdowns of fragile central servers could rely instead on a network of servers coordinated by sophisticated software. It was "air traffic control" for internet packets and routing. Venture capital money poured in, and Akamai Technologies was born in 1998, with Sagan as chief operating officer. But all was not well: While "everyone wanted a piece" of Akamai, the company was hemorrhaging funds. Then in early 2001, the internet economy burst, and Akamai's customers vanished.

"We were feeling sorry for ourselves," says Sagan, who recalls laying off 2/3rds of the employees. "Then the unthinkable happened:" Danny Lewin died in the crash of Flight 11 on 9/11. "Few believed a business, especially ours, could survive a blow like that." Sagan was determined to shepherd the company through the twin disasters of economic collapse, and the loss of the "driving force" of Akamai's culture.

He slowly rebuilt the customer base, focusing on selling services to larger corporations that promised greater stability. Some clients "turned out to be real businesses," such as Yahoo and Amazon. 2003 saw Akamai's first positive cash flow, and the first profits came a year later. As he closes the books on 2009, Sagan proudly cites revenues approaching $900 million. He's unshaken in his conviction that the "internet is the biggest business idea of our generation." Akamai, says Sagan, "will hopefully face a little bit less adversity" in its second decade.

About the Speaker(s): Paul Sagan joined Akamai in October 1998. He was elected to the Akamai Board of Directors in January 2005, and became CEO in April 2005. Previously Sagan served as a senior advisor to the World Economics Forum, consulting on information technology in the corporate world.

In 1995, Sagan was named President and Editor of New Media at Time Inc. He was a managing editor of Time Warner's News on Demand project, and a founder of Road Runner, the first broadband cable modem service. In 1991, Sagan developed NY 1 News, a cable network known for its use of digital video technology.

Sagan is a graduate of Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism, and he began his career in broadcast news at WCBS"TV in 1981. He is a three"time Emmy Award winner, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Global Leader for Tomorrow with the World Economic Forum. He is also a director of Massachusetts"based EMC Corporation.

Description: Today, cell phones are a menace to safe driving, as they distract operators who should otherwise focus on the road. Tomorrow, cell phones could actually improve our driving, and help drivers avoid traffic congestion, use the road system more effectively, and manage the parking supply. Li"Shiuan Peh says that the key to these services are future mobile devices that will have the computer power equivalent to today's large servers in data centers. Combined with rapid advances in wireless networking, these mobile devices will be harnessed to provide new apps, like next generation transportation programs.

We currently use the Internet and Wi"Fi or 3G and then run our programs in the cloud on heavyweight servers. Peh says that an opposite case is likely to emerge, with a move towards collaborative computing, using mobile devices and localized cell phones to replace the heavyweight servers. She envisions a time when advanced cell phones will be "stitched together" to run a single piece or information or a program. Peh says this grassroots type of computing will appeal to the general public, "the sociology" of users, who like to be involved in transportation activities. Behind this collaborative computing, engineers are fine"tuning a sophisticated mesh"network of communications.

One of the key protocols for the mesh network is for dedicated short"range communications (DSRC). It is vital for mobile applications, like accident prevention, because it is micro"seconds faster than current standards. DSRC will have very high local coverage, provide faster and more complete transmissions than existing cell towers, and, in particular, be able to overcome the coverage issues of tunnels and dead"spots. Moore's Law scaling would predict that the computing power needed to advance DSRC applications would be more powerful and more efficient that what we know today.

Location resident services are quite demanding from a communications point of view. Engineers must design around the fact that the phones must be able to hand"off information and exchange it with each other, since the handsets/cars will move in and out of a cordon. Peh notes that existing intelligent vehicle programs in the United States, Europe, and Singapore are using elements of mesh communications today, and that collaborative computing will become the better solution. Mesh computing can also have very local and practical applications. Stitching cell phones, cameras, and databases together could provide a real"time tool for Amber Alerts, and help solve problems that require geographic sensing, such as locating missing children. Similar sets of technologies could be stitched together to reduce congestion and fuel use as they guide drivers to open parking spots.

Description: Dries Buytaert relates a synopsis of his life with Drupal from its inception while a "typical geek" undergraduate in Antwerp in 1999 to the upcoming release of Drupal 7 with a particular emphasis on the community that has been created by the nature of an open source product. Drupal is "software to build websites with" intended for anyone to modify and improve then redistribute to its users.

Community is a recurring theme throughout his dialogue. When 40 users attended his first DrupalCon in 2004, Dries found it "shocking" that so many people would fly to Antwerp just to "talk about Drupal all day." When his shared server experienced the "Big Drupal Server Meltdown of 2005," he was further astounded by the community's response-Sun Microsystems donated an Enterprise server, the Open Source Lab offered hosting and administration services, and end users donated $10K.

The statistics are impressive. Websites using Drupal include Yahoo!, Sony Music, Google, MIT, Harvard, and, recently, The White House. There are thousands of developers, half a million websites, a quarter of a million downloads of Drupal core and over one million unique visitors each month.

Having created Drupal in brief spurts grabbed in hours here and there, Buytaert decided to devote himself full"time to Drupal after defending his PhD in 2007. With each incremental milestone creating opportunities for more improvements and problem solving, Buytaert now wanted to devote himself to providing the necessary commercial grade support. To that end, he created Acquia-a company based in Boston-to reduce the barriers to adoption and the problems related to starting big sites. Growing pains required the organization to think less from a developer's point of view and more from an end user's view with the goal of making Drupal easier to use. Users were now categorized as clients, site builders, or developers. Each "user" would have a different view of the site and each would require different tools for getting around.

Buytaert recognized that while Drupal is good at fixing small, incremental issues, it now needed to step back and take a more "holistic view" to improve overall usability. The newly hired management team worked diligently to change the information architecture, improving navigation and making it easier for any end user to find information quicker.

Using a series of screenshots, Buytaert delineates the specific feature modifications for each set of users that will be included in Drupal 7. He recognizes how important the work that is being done now will "define the future of Drupal and [its] ability to succeed and compete with other systems."

Even though Drupal 7 is not ready for release yet-it is in code freeze-Buytaert encourages users to become familiar with its new functionality and features. More than 500 users in the Drupal community have already contributed to patches and improvements as Drupal continues to evolve.

About the Speaker(s): Dries Buytaert is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. Buytaert serves as president of the Drupal Association, a non"profit organization formed to help Drupal flourish. He is also co"founder and chief technology officer of Acquia, a venture"backed software company that offers products and services for Drupal. Dries is also a co"founder of Mollom, a web service that helps identify content quality and stop website spam.

A native of Belgium, Buytaert holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University and a Licentiate Computer Science (MsC) from the University of Antwerp.

Buytaert has been recognized for his work in BusinessWeek's "Young Entrepreneurs of Tech" list of Top 30"and"Under Innovators for 2008, Technology Review's "35 Young Innovator 2008" whose inventions and research they find most exciting, and MindTouch's 2009 Open Source "Top 5 Most Influential People."

Description: Visiting the San Diego Zoo's orangutans and chimpanzees inspires Patrick Henry Winston to ponder what makes humans different from our primate cousins. His field of artificial intelligence extends that question to thinking about how humans differ from computers. Winston's goal is to "develop a computational theory of intelligence."

Bridging the gap from people to machines requires a complex understanding of how we think. Winston asserts we think with our eyes, our hands, our mouth. Humans rely upon visual, motor, and linguistic faculties to learn and solve problems. Perceptual powers enable naming, describing, categorizing and recalling. In the aggregate, these processes are "commonsense," a hallmark of cognition that Winston aims to vest in computer programs -- to endow transistors with the nuanced capabilities of neurons.

Crucially, we also think with our stories. Throughout childhood and formal education, we are taught via fairy tales, myths, history, literature, religion, and popular entertainment. Professional disciplines like law, science, medicine, engineering, and business are conveyed through stories too.

Recognizing patterns, relationships, and mistakes, as well as abstract concepts like revenge or success, helps us explain, predict, answer questions. The delicate processes of extracting knowledge and capturing meaning may appear seamless or instinctive in the evolved mind, but must be parsed syntactically to "teach" a computer to achieve the same ends.

What might be practical applications "for systems that understood stories"? Winston suggests that decision"making in business and military strategy would benefit. And no less, comprehending cultures. If a computer program could derive clues from context, perhaps it could determine why "what plays in Peoria" doesn't translate to Baghdad.

Early efforts to build a computational theory of intelligence focused on "symbolic integrationWe figured out how to make programs do calculus by 1960but computers remained as dumb as stones," Winston says. When we progressed to building robots -- "things that move" -- language was still lacking. "We forgot that the distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence is that linguistic veneer that stands above our perceptual apparatus," he remarks.

A paradox emerging from Winston's study of how humans think is that "computers make us stupid." For instance, when students are freed from taking notes, absence of "forced engagement" with the material hinders learning. He cautions that teachers confuse the "presentation of information with the delivery of information." Too many words on a slide (or talking too fast) "jams the language processor" and impedes digesting content.

Winston summarizes with an appealing prescription for becoming smarter. "Take notesdraw picturestalk and imaginetell stories!" The very act of explaining to another elucidates a lesson for oneself.

About the Speaker(s): Patrick Henry Winston has been affiliated with MIT for five decades: from undergraduate and graduate education, to faculty appointment, to deep involvement in the life of the Institute through numerous committee memberships. In 1967, he joined the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serving as director for 25 years, and continuing in the successor Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Winston focuses on integration of vision, language, and motor faculties to explain intelligence. His current research, the Human Intelligence Enterprise, is an interdisciplinary confluence of computer science, systems neuroscience, cognitive science, and linguistics. He also pursues an interest in the intriguing field of "computational politics," uniting computer scientists and social scientists toward an enlightened understanding of thinking in many cultures.

Beyond academia, Winston cofounded Ascent Technology, Inc., a company that develops A.I. applications in resource planning and scheduling for airports and the Department of Defense. He is in his third term on the Naval Research Advisory Committee, for which he studied how to utilize technological advances for an all"electric Navy. This work was recognized with a Meritorious Public Service Award.

Winston is past president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has written or edited 17 books, including texts on programming languages and artificial intelligence, as well as anthologies of A.I. research.

Description: The 2008 presidential campaign may have fused politics and entertainment once and for all. Three panelists and moderator Henry Jenkinsdiscuss the nature and implications of this convergence.

To Johanna Blakley, political candidates who understand the meaning of style "can communicate volumes," and to her eye, Barack Obama "has amazing skill." His campaign, dubbed "brand Obama," engaged celebrities and pop music, utilized the internet, broadcast and cable TV, and "rarely made a misstep," says Blakley. In fact, McCain "desperately tried to make Obama look bad for being in synch with popular culturebut it ended up biting him on the ass." Blakley also discusses her survey work with Zogby International, which creates political "typologies" of the American public not simply by asking about political affiliation but examining the intersection of political beliefs and entertainment preferences. The partisan divides among Red, Blue and Purple hold up in people's cultural affiliations. Whatever the ideology, the "entertainment experience always ends up leaking into real lives."

While at the Democratic Convention, David Carr was conversing with Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark and found "a kid to my right live blogging our conversation. I thought, it doesn't get any more meta than this." The "miracle" of the Obama campaign, Carr believes, was how it "organized itself," through an "adhocracy self"assigned by geography and expertise." People picked tools provided by the campaign that suited them. Blogging, videos, and mash"ups emerged without much campaign oversight. Says Carr, it "became kind of a style thing, an expression of who you are." People didn't call and ask for support so much as ask, "Have you seen this video by will.i.am. --let me send it to you." Watching Saturday Night Live and Tina Fey's Sarah Palin became an "expression of cultural identity which became a part of political identity. " Citizen"generated content took over this campaign, and isn't going away for the next election cycle. But, warns Carr, this "mass niche of like minds," can be "a tool for marketing democracy and/or fascism."

Stephen Duncombe recalls a brilliant move by Obama after a bruising debate with Hillary Clinton: he brushed the shoulder of his suit jacket, quoting a music video by rapper Jay"Z, "Dirt Off Your Shoulder." He instantly distanced himself from Clinton on the cultural level, and was embraced by American youth, who remixed the Obama moment, and unleashed it on the Web. To Duncombe, this moment crystallized how politicos "can start to think about popular culture in a productive way." Pop culture is a "unique laboratory of fantasy that can be explored, understood, mobilized and actualized through political practice." Obama succeeded by imbibing a variety of pop culture icons and ideals and said, "I'm a mixed race, latte"sipping urban guy who likes basketball and hip hop." Duncombe says that the conflation of politics and culture need not degrade politics, if people "do it with integrity, with honor."

About the Speaker(s): Johanna Blakley conducts research on celebrity culture, global entertainment, and digital technology. She's a member of the Entertainment Computing working group in the International Federation for Information Processing.

Before coming to the Lear Center in 2000, she was a web producer/web analyst for Knowledge Adventure, and a web consultant for Blueprint R&D.

Blakley has an M.A. in English from the University of Oregon, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
David Carr began working at the Times in 2002, covering the magazine publishing industry for the Business section. Prior to arriving at the Times, Carr was a contributing writer for The Atlantic Monthly and New York Magazine, writing articles that ranged from homeland security issues to the movie industry. In 2000, he was the media writer for Inside.com, a web news site focusing on the business of entertainment and publishing.

Previously, Carr served as editor of the Washington City Paper, an alternative weekly in Washington D.C. for five years. During that time, he wrote a column, "Paper Trail," which focused on media issues in the nation's capital. In 1997, Carr received first place in the media category of the Association of Alternative Weeklies annual awards for "Good News "

From 1993 to 1995, Carr was editor of the Twin Cities Reader, a Minneapolis"based alternative weekly, and wrote a media column there as well. Before serving as editor of the Reader, Carr worked for a variety of business, entertainment and sports publications in the Twin Cities area.
Stephen Duncombe teaches the history and politics of media and culture and is the author, most recently, of Dream: Re"Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy(2007). Other books include The Bobbed Haired Bandit: a True Story of Crime and Celebrity in 1920s New York, with Andrew Mattson (2006), and Cultural Resistance Reader(editor, 2002). He is working on a book about the art of propaganda during the New Deal.

Duncombe has been a professor at NYU since 1999. He received his M.Phil. and Ph.D. from the City University of New York in Sociology.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: In his unassuming way, Craig Newmark believes his eponymous website might just help nudge people toward greater civic engagement. While Craigslist.org "is a simple platform where people help each other out," focusing on everyday needs like getting a job or an apartment, it is also a profoundly collaborative venture, with political potential.

Newmark outlines the Craigslist success story, which began as a hobby for him in the early 1990s. Newmark quickly detected the Internet's social networking possibilities, and built an email list for friends "to get the word out on cool events, arts and technology." He developed an instant fan base, with people suggesting new items to add to the list like "stuff to sell," and he soon felt encouraged to expand. His name for the site was "SF Events," but friends nixed that title, infinitely preferring their own version: "Craig's List." Says Newmark, "I had a brand already, and it was personal and quirky. I didn't know what a brand was at that point, but I learned and they were right." < br>
By the end of 1997, the site was receiving one million page views per month, but was still being run on a volunteer basis. Newmark was doing software and customer service, and recognized he could not also provide strong leadership. As a self"professed nerd who "lived the Dilbert life," Newmark grasped that his hobby had grown too big to manage on his own, so in 2000, after having formally incorporated, he hired a CEO, and threw himself into customer service, corporate governance, and staying on top of technological innovations that could enhance the website. Craigslist is now approaching 13 billion page views per month.

Through this explosive growth, Newmark has remained true to his business values: "We can do well as a company financially by doing good stuff for people." He has no plans to sell Craigslist. "There's nothing altruistic, noble or pious about it. We figure once we make enough money to live comfortably and provide for the futureit's more satisfying to change things." He's been involved for years "with a guy named Barack" and views himself as a "community meta organizer," using the internet to allow face to face communication on a scale of tens of millions. Some prominent interests: using social networking to spark volunteer national service; making government more transparent; shining a light on campaign financing, and helping out returning Iraq and Afghanistan vets and their families.

About the Speaker(s): In 1995, Craig Newmark began his career in community organizing by starting "craigslist" as a list service to share community information on upcoming events in San Francisco with his close circle of friends.

Craigslist has evolved to a community service website with over 50 million community members located in more than 576 cities in 50 different countries who are generating over 15 billion page views per month, sharing common values and information.

Newmark earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Case Western Reserve University.
Newmark is a vocal advocate of keeping the Internet free. He has donated $10,000 to a non"profit group, NewAssignment.Net, which plans to combine the work of amateurs and professionals to produce investigative stories on the Internet.

Host(s): Sloan School of Management, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

Description: Cynthia Breazeal's eminently charming creatures appear to have stepped out of Santa's North Pole workshop. But Breazeal wants you to know that her robots are attempts to create socially intelligent machines "whose behaviors are governed not just by physics but by having a mind," and which might someday collaborate with humans in critical interactions.

Breazeal wants to shift the concept of robots from machines that explore distant places like Mars, or vacuum floors, to devices that can function in society at large, dealing with people on a daily basis "to enhance daily life, to help us as partners."

Building sophisticated machines means delving into human social intelligence, our ability to develop a sense of self, communicate thoughts and feelings in words and gestures, and interact with others. Humans are wired to read the underlying mental states of our fellows. Can robots learn to "sense and perceive and interpret the same non"verbal cues to coordinate their 'mind' and behavior with people," wonders Breazeal. Indeed, could a robot "potentially leverage its interaction with people to help bootstrap its own cognitive development"?

She demonstrates some remarkable milestones in the journey to develop such a machine. Leonardo, a Yoda"like creature, seems to have the cognitive savvy of a young child, with object permanence and a theory of other minds. He and a human confederate watch a Big Bird doll get hidden under a box. The human leaves, then Leonardo observes a hooded man place the doll under a basket. The confederate re"enters the room, asking Leonardo, "Can you find where I think Big Bird is?" Leo points to the box (but like a child, gives the game away by looking at the basket).

Leo has also absorbed social referents, reaching eagerly for Big Bird, who's been described in a cheerful voice as fun and jolly, and shrinking away from a Cookie Monster doll, which the human "parent" has characterized with scary tone and gestures as bad. If robots are going to exist in our world, says Breazeal, they have to learn from us when things are safe to explore.

Breazeal's next generation of mobile and personable creations may serve as helpmates, tutors, teammates, or even companions "addressing the loneliness of old age." They will certainly bring us closer to the question of "when might a machine be a person."

About the Speaker(s): Cynthia Breazeal directs the Media Lab's Personal Robots group. She was previously a postdoctoral associate at MIT's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. Breazeal is particularly interested in developing creature"like technologies that exhibit social commonsense and engage people in familiar human terms. Kismet, her anthropomorphic robotic head, has been featured in international media and is the subject of her book Designing Sociable Robots, published by the MIT Press. She continues to develop anthropomorphic robots as part of her ongoing work of building artificial systems that learn from and interact with people in an intelligent, life"like, and sociable manner.

Breazeal earned Sc.D. and M.S. degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, and a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Description: Cynthia Breazealmakes social robots, machines with the capacity to interact with people on psychological terms. She says they "open up a new world of questions." But these increasingly sophisticated devices make Sherry Turkle uneasy, since they challenge the idea of human relationships and the very "purpose, importance, of living things."

Since inventing her famously expressive, anthropomorphic Kismet, a robot that engages and learns from people through auditory, facial and social cues, Breazeal has evolved her work using robots as a scientific tool for social understanding. Her labs are putting robots through the paces of major child development milestones, such as appreciating the mental states of others. For instance, robot Leonardo has rudimentary object permanence, inferring from a tricky human's behavior where a Big Bird toy has been hidden.

Another project uses robots in home"based weight management studies, where they cue dieters to provide information on food intake, and provide moral support to wavering calorie counters. People form emotional attachments and name their robot partners, says Breazeal, and the robot method easily outperforms pen and paper, or computers, in helping people stick with their programs.

Another effort involves the Huggable, a teddy bear robot that acts via an internet connection to allow a distant grandparent to touch and play with the grandchildren -- "as a new kind of communication media." And Breazeal provides a first"view of the MDS, a semi"autonomous robot that will combine state"of"the"art mobility, dexterity and social interaction.

This new species of extremely appealing, touchy, feely, humanoid machine puts Sherry Turkle on edge. She sees society on the verge of a "robotic moment," as plugged in, instant messaging, virtual world denizens increasingly embrace machines as "creatures they feel a desire to connect with and nurture." She believes people are passionately attaching themselves to sociable robots, and fantasizing a reciprocal interest from these machines. "You care about them and want them to care about you. Nurturance turns out to be the killer app in robotics." She describes a graduate student who would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a robot exhibiting "caring human behavior."

There is a danger that we'll become accustomed to superficial cyber connections, and develop lower expectations for human to human interactions, says Turkle. Cyber intimacy may lead to cyber solitude. And you can turn off a robot when it bores you, or conversely, depend on it to "live" forever, while human relations come with endless baggage, complexities and sometimes unhappy endings. Says Turkle, "Roboticists have come to speak of 'I Thou' relationships with machines, but what is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to the shared store of human meaning? These are not questions with ready made answers."

About the Speaker(s): Cynthia Breazeal directs the Media Lab's Personal Robots group. She was previously a postdoctoral associate at MIT's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. Breazeal is particularly interested in developing creature"like techologies that exhibit social commonsense and engage people in familiar human terms. Kismet, her anthropomorphic robotic head, has been featured in international media and is the subject of her book Designing Sociable Robots, published by the MIT Press. She continues to develop anthropomorphic robots as part of her ongoing work of building artificial systems that learn from and interact with people in an intelligent, life"like, and sociable manner.

Breazeal earned Sc.D. and M.S. degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, and a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Sherry Turkle is engaged in active study of robots, digital pets, and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly as well as in a study of mobile cellular technologies. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Falling For Science: Objects in Mind, appeared in Spring 2008. The third volume, The Inner History of Devices, will follow in Fall 2008. Turkle is currently completing a book on robots and the human spirit based on the Initiative's 10"year research program on relational artifacts.

Description: William Mitchell and Ryan Chin propose an attractive alternative to the carbon"belching, gas"guzzling autos clogging our thoroughfares, a vision that is as much about transforming cities as about remaking cars. The City Car, a tiny, electric"powered, foldable, stackable vehicle, is their solution to freeing urban centers of paralyzing, polluting traffic, and the nightmare of parking.

Along with a tiny footprint and lack of tailpipe emissions, the City Car comes equipped with an onboard operating system that allows the car to communicate with the rest of the fleet, and omni"directional robot wheels that turn (all the way around) on a dime. Chin enthuses about the car as a "highly personalizable, customizable thing," whose intelligence will allow it to be ergonomically configured for each driver, and whose exterior may reflect the color or even political preferences of the driver through organic LEDs.

The principle behind the car is shared use _ a ride you can grab where and when you need it, especially useful for that last leg of a commute. Mitchell describes stacks of these cars stationed at the most useful points around a city, wherever you need mobility. Swipe a credit card, pick up your ride, and drop it off at your destination. Says Mitchell, "It's like having valet parking everywhere, except you don't have a 17"year"old who's going to drive your car at high speed..."

City Cars "make much more efficient use of urban infrastructure," says Mitchell. Regular cars sit around 80% of the time, "burning up expensive urban real estate." More than 500 City Cars could be parked around a city block. On the road, these cars are much friendlier to pedestrians and bicyclists than SUVs. Mitchell envisions far fewer road deaths in a City Car future.

Mitchell believes the City Car could "change the auto business from what it is now, a low margin, commodity product business, to an innovative service business." Think Google rather than Ford. Shared use vehicles could also drive a "dynamic new energy market, compatible with clean, intermittent energy sources," charging up when the sun shines and sending unused battery capacity to the grid.

Mitchell demonstrates his grand ambition with images of Florence, Italy. Today, "all the centers of humanism in Florence are actually parking lots." With rows of City Cars in underground lots, "we give the piazzas back to the people." Theory has shifted into practice, as City Car"like scooters head for Milan and to Taipei, where they will be stationed at convenience stores that dot the city.

Some challenges stand in the way of shared use vehicles taking our cities by storm: Regulations and politics must align to support this complement to public transportation; and consumers in large numbers must be persuaded to give up private car ownership. "What I want is a clean, perfectly maintained vehicle at my disposal when I need it, perfectly reliable, preheated, pre"cooled when I get into it," says Mitchell. "Why on earth would you want to own a motor car?"

About the Speaker(s): William J. Mitchell is the former Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Prior to coming to MIT, he was the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His latest book is Imagining MIT, (MIT Press, 2007). His previous books include: e"topia: Urban Life, Jim-But Not As We Know It, (MIT Press, 1999) High Technology and Low"Income Communities, with Donald A. Sch_n and Bish Sanyal (MIT Press, 1998) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, (MIT Press, 1995) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post"Photographic Era, (MIT Press, 1992) The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition, (MIT Press, 1990).

Mitchell holds a B.Arch. from the University of Melbourne, an M.Ed. from Yale University, and an M.A. from Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mitchell is currently chair of The National Academies Committee on Information Technology and Creativity.

Ryan C.C. Chin is a doctoral student in the Smart Cities research group under the supervision of Professor William J. Mitchell.

He is investigating the role of mass"customization and personalization in product development processes. His current research centers on the development of a concept car with General Motors. The concept car project is a design exploration utilizing multidisciplinary design processes. The vehicle itself serves as a platform for Media lab technological innovation and investigates issues of connectivity, human"machine interface, fabrication, and design computation.

After receiving his Master of Architecture from MIT, he joined the MIT Media Lab as a research specialist for CC++: The Car Research group. He most recently finished his Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences in 2005. Prior to MIT, Ryan received his Bachelor of Civil Engineering and Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Catholic University of America.

Description: Contemporary artificial intelligence researchers (as well as neurologists and Karl Jung) are taken to task in this talk by one of the world's preeminent scholars of artificial intelligence.
Marvin Minsky is worried that after making great strides in its infancy, AI has lost its way, getting bogged down in different theories of machine learning. Researchers -have tried to invent single techniques that could deal with all problems, but each method works only in certain domains." Minsky believes we're facing an AI emergency, since soon there won't be enough human workers to perform the necessary tasks for our rapidly aging population.
So while we have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, we don't have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case. For -a machine to have common sense, it must know 50 million such things," and like a human, activate different kinds of expertise in different realms of thought, says Minsky.
Minsky suggests that such a machine should, like humans, have a very high-level, rule-based system for recognizing certain kinds of problems. He labels these parts of the brain -critics." When one critic gets selected in a particular situation, the others get turned off. In the -cloud of resources" that comprises our mind, mental states, from emotions to reasoning, result from activating or suppressing the right resource. Minsky further refines his machine's reasoning architecture with six levels of thinking that attempt to emulate the different kinds of reasoning humans may engage in, often simultaneously: These include learned reactions, deliberative thinking, and reflective thinking, among others. A smart machine must have at least these levels, he says, because psychology, unlike physics, doesn't lend itself to a minimal number of laws. With at least 400 different areas of the brain operating, -if a theory tries to explain everything by just 20 principles, it's doing something wrong."
Today, while we have machines that can automatically assemble clothes, we don't have any that know how to sew together a tear in a shirt or a suit. Minsky proposes a new kind of AI that might eventually result in a -really resourceful, clever thinking machine...with knowledge about how to do things," and which -can do the broad range of things children can do."

About the Speaker(s): Marvin Minsky is one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, and helped establish in 1959 what would become the MIT AI Lab.

Minsky has made many groundbreaking contributions to AI, cognitive psychology, mathematics, computational linguistics, robotics, and optics. In recent years he has worked chiefly on imparting to machines the human capacity for commonsense reasoning. His conception of human intellectual structure and function is presented in The Society of Mind (CDROM, book) which is also the title of the course he teaches at MIT.

Other works include Matter, Mind, and Models(1963), A Framework for Representing Knowledge(1974), and his latest book, The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind.

Minsky holds a B.A. (Harvard, 1949) and Ph.D. (Princeton, 1954), both in Mathematics. Among the many honors he has received are the ACM Turing Award, the Japan Prize, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal. He also is the inventor of the widely used Confocal Scanning Microscope.

Host(s): School of Engineering, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

Description: Can human beings, with the help of smart machines, not merely avoid -collective idiocy" (in Sandy Pentland's words), but actually achieve a degree of intelligence previously unattainable by either humans or machines alone? These three panelists study the possibilities from different angles.
Thomas Malone's Center for Collective Intelligence examines such evolving intelligent systems as Wikipedia, which relies on a veritable army of volunteers to -create a high quality product with almost no centralized control," and Google, with its technology -harvesting knowledge" and serving up answers to a vast audience of seekers. While a crowd doesn't guarantee the best solution to a problem, Malone sees opportunities in -prediction markets," where humans, with the computational help of computers, predict things with greater accuracy than single experts, whether in electoral politics, or in medical diagnostics. Malone's research is also attempting to set up metrics to measure the intelligence of these new human group-machine hybrids, and ways of applying collective decision making to climate change policy.
Alex (Sandy) Pentland performed a unique experiment in a large German bank, tagging its employees with special badges that tracked individuals' interactions, down to head nodding, body language, and tone of voice. His research, conducted over a month, looked at how face to face interactions played into the overall organizational flow. The patterns he uncovered in the data collected from his name badges and from email and more traditional documentation, demonstrated the significance of social dynamics in workplace productivity. Certain individuals acted as information bottlenecks; others as polarizers, group thinkers, or gossip mongers. Pentland shared information about these patterns of communication with individuals. -Rather than think of this as big brother," says Pentland, -think of this as a personal intelligence tool that collectively produces better results." Related technology might be able to detect depression by examining a person's patterns of socialization.
Karim R. Lakhani says he -stumbled into collective intelligence and distributed information systems as a puzzle." While trying to market his large corporation's medical imaging system, he discovered that a small Canadian group had -leapfrogged" his R&D team. A community of radiologists and physicists pooled their expertise to improve imaging technology, and beat a large, centralized lab. Since that time, Lakhani has pursued other examples of decentralized groups of people with a wide range of motivations, efficiently cracking complex problems-- from the open source software community, to biotech labs and entrepreneurial ventures. A T-shirt company, Threadless, asks its online community of a half million to submit T-shirt designs, and vote on them. The best scoring designs go into production. Sales are closing in on 1.5 million shirts at $20 a pop. Says Lakhani, -One hope of collective intelligence is that it takes the distributed and sticky pockets of knowledge that exist in the world and finds ways to aggregate them for us."

About the Speaker(s): Thomas W. Malone was one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century". His research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

The past two decades of Malone's research are summarized in his book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Malone is the co-editor of three other books, as well.
Malone has been a co-founder of three software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. Before joining the MIT faculty in 1983, Malone was a research scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where his research involved designing educational software and office information systems. He earned a Ph.D. and two master's degrees from Stanford University, a B.A. from Rice University, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering-economic systems, and psychology.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: Now that it's possible to work, politick or party with partners round the world, round the clock, what have we got to show for it? These speakers offer some intriguing examples of the potential of internet-driven collectives, as well as some cautionary notes.
Moderator Thomas Malone describes a NASA -clickworker" project enabling amateurs to help identify craters on the surface of Mars; and Garry Kasparov's 1999 chess match against 'the world' _a team that voted via the internet on its moves against the champion. Kasparov said it was the hardest game he'd ever played.
Current estimates show anywhere from 50-170 million people participating in MySpace, and 80 million in Facebook, notes Trebor Scholz. There is of course a cost to this online social life. Scholz notes it is an -incredibly expensive, arduous process to support," with server farms and corporate sponsors. But as much as big business may be required to back social networking, users provide valuable content for which they are not remunerated. All the content individuals upload, from personal data, to videos, photos, blogs and links, gets put to work. Scholz perceives -a commercialization of social life itself" in this virtual world, as well as the danger that people get locked into communities, -giving away their music, books, pictures, jobs, education, birth dates, sexual orientation," and then become a -captive audience" within an increasingly commercial web space. Why not nonprofit alternatives to media giants, he suggests, and public control over content.
When the Starwood group wanted to design a new hotel, they did it in Second Life, recounts Cory Ondrejka. Quite a few of this virtual world's six million users jumped right in, creating a community of designers who let the chain's CEO know, among other things, that they didn't like the look and feel of the lobby. And when Second Life users rankled at a new company policy on taxation, they figured out an ingenious way to get their web host's attention: a group of virtual protesters met potential new users, -lighting themselves on fire while waving protest signs." It was impressive to watch, says Ondrejka, and -was a pretty good way to get us to pay attention."
With its focus on portable play with trading cards and handhelds, Pokemon was a breakthrough, boosting children's media to unprecedented levels, says Mimi Ito. Pokemon not only demonstrated to the industry that children could master -a pantheon of hundreds of characters with unique characteristics" but that -social exchange was a central reason for why the content was widely popular." Ito describes -the intense exchange of information when children are engaging in it," extremely critical from a learning perspective. Perhaps more important, she says, is that -kids have the realization that they are participating in a collective imagination that is greater than what they could master on their own."

About the Speaker(s): Thomas W. Malone was one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century". His research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

The past two decades of Malone's research are summarized in his book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life (Harvard Business School Press, 2004). Malone is the co-editor of three other books, as well.
Malone has been a cofounder of three software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. Before joining the MIT faculty in 1983, Malone was a research scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where his research involved designing educational software and office information systems. He earned a Ph.D. and two master's degrees from Stanford University, a B.A. from Rice University, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering-economic systems, and psychology.

Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Description: The code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, which helped save Britain from Nazi Germany, qualifies as one of the greatest stories of World War II, and the misunderstood genius, Alan Turing, stands at the center of this tale. Perhaps no one understands Turing's role during this period -- and his larger impact on mathematics and computing -- like B. Jack Copeland. In this lecture, Copeland contends that Turing should be celebrated as the father of artificial intelligence.
He dates the origins of AI -to the dark days in 1940, 1941" when Turing and fellow code-breakers were pitted against the Nazi code machine Enigma. Copeland describes how Turing broke the previously inviolable indicator system of Enigma, and helped design electromechanical machines to read thousands of German radio intercepts. These devices employed heuristic searching, which is now a central idea of AI. They found the right answer -often enough and fast enough to be read in real time." Without such machines, German U-boats would have decimated the North Atlantic convoys providing a lifeline to Britain.
Copeland notes that Turing was hooked on this idea of heuristic problem solving, and that he speculated on building sophisticated machines by -making use of guided search." Well before the breakout of war, Turing had conceived of a general computing machine that stored programs in memory. The world's first large-scale, electronic computer, Colossus was used at Bletchley to break other Nazi codes, and Turing found additional inspiration for pursuing ideas of machine intelligence. -Nowadays when nearly everyone owns the physical realization of a universal Turing machine, Turing's idea of a one-stop shop computing machine is apt to seem as obvious as the wheel," says Copeland. But in 1936, engineers -thought in terms of building specific machines for particular purposes." Turing's idea was revolutionary.
After the war, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and developed the schematics for an Automatic Computing Engine, intended as the first electronic stored-program general-purpose digital computer. AI was central to his vision, believes Copeland. He described this project as -building a brain." Turing speculated about constructing networks of unorganized, artificial neurons that could be trained to carry out particular tasks. He also published an account of the Turing Test, a method for determining whether a computer -thinks." Finally, Copeland defends the Turing Test against its many detractors, and predicts that -the probability of AI getting its act together in 50 years to produce a machine that can pass the Turing Test is pretty good."

About the Speaker(s): B. Jack Copeland has taught at the University of Canterbury since 1985. He is Chair of the School of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He received his D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford (1979) for research on modal and nonclassical logics.

His publications include Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2006);The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press, 2004); Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine (Oxford University Press, 2005); Logic and Reality (Oxford University Press, 1996); and Artificial Intelligence (Blackwell, 1993). He has published more than 100 articles on the philosophy and history of computing, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. He is currently writing a book on Turing's philosophical and logical work, Turing's Machines, and also a book on the philosophy of religion.

Copeland has held a variety of visiting professorships at institutions internationally. He is founding editor of The Rutherford Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and serves on the editorial boards of various philosophical journals. In 2000 he received a Marsden award from the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2003 the Scientific American Sci/Tech Web Award for his on-line archive.

Description: Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)
Ray Kurzweil confidently states that artificial intelligence will, in the not distant future, "master human intelligence." He cites the "exponential power of growth in technology" that will enable both a minute, detailed understanding of the human brain, and the capacity for building a machine that can at least simulate original thought. The "frontier" such a machine must cross is emotional intelligence-"being funny, expressing loving sentiment" And when this occurs, says Kurzweil, it's not entirely clear that the entity will have achieved consciousness, since we have no "consciousness detector" to determine if it is capable of subjective experiences.
Acknowledging that his position will prove unpopular, David Gelernter launches his attack: "We won't even be able to build super"intelligent zombies unless we approach the problem right." This means admitting that a continuum of cognitive styles exists among humans. As for building a conscious machine, he sees no possibility of one emerging from even the most sophisticated software. "Consciousness means the presence of mental states strictly private with no visible functions or consequences. A conscious entity can call on a thought or memory merely to feel happy, be inspired, soothed, feel anger" Software programs, by definition, can be separated out, peeled away and run in a logically identical way on any computing platform. How could such a program spontaneously give rise to "a new node of consciousness?"
Kurzweil concedes the difficulty of defining consciousness, but does not want to wish away the concept, since it serves as the basis for our moral and ethical systems. He maintains his argument that reverse engineering of the human brain will enable machines that can act with a level of complexity, from which somehow consciousness will emerge.
Gelernter replies that believing this "seems a completely arbitrary claim. Anything might be true, but I don't see what makes the claim plausible." Ultimately, he says, Kurzweil must explain objectively and scientifically what consciousness is -- "how it's created and got there." Kurzweil stakes his claim on our future capacity to model digitally the actions of billions of neurons and neurotransmitters, which in humans somehow give rise to consciousness. Gelernter believes such a machine might simulate mental states, but not actually pass muster as a conscious entity. Ultimately, he questions the desirability of building such computers: "We might reach the state some day when we prefer the company of a robot from Walmart to our next"door neighbor or roommates."

About the Speaker(s): David Gelernter is also contributing editor at the Weekly Standard and member of the National Council of the Arts. He's the author of books, technical articles, essays, art criticism, and fiction. "Breaking out of the box" (NY Times Magazine, '97) forecast and described the advent of less"ugly computers.

He wrote the non"fiction book, Drawing Life: Surviving The Unabomber (Free Press, 1997) and the novels, 1939 and Machine Beauty. He's written for Commentary,ArtNews, The Washington Post and many other periodicals.

He earned a B.A.from Yale University in 1976, and a Ph.D.from The State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1982. He joined the Yale faculty in 1982.
Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni"font optical character recognition (OCR), the first print"to"speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat"bed scanner, the first text"to"speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed, large"vocabulary speech recognition.

Ray Kurzweil received the $500,000 Lemelson"MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation, and was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventor Hall of Fame. He won the Winston Gordon medal from the Canadian National Institute for the Blind for his pioneering work using technology for the benefit of blind people. He also received the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has received 12 honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Kurzweil has written five books and hundreds of articles. His most recent work,The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking), was published in Spring 2005.

Kurzweil received a B.S. in Computer Science and Literature, from MIT in 1970.

Description: One of the web's master entrepreneurs has devised a novel way to expand his domain. Jeff Bezos explains how Amazon, already home to 59 million active customers worldwide, hopes to beguile increasing numbers of developers to use web services that the company evolved for its own operations.
Bezos' plan involves renting out the -guts of Amazon" -- the servers and software code and networking behind the online shopping giant. He describes a trio of services. The first, Mechanical Turk, named for a 19th century chess automaton (actually run by a human) -makes it possible to encode human intelligence inside a software application," Bezos informs us. At Amazon, Mechanical Turk employs simple software to allow individuals to -vote" on product detail pages to help eliminate duplicate images and products. Work traditionally done by an in-house unit can be performed by a distributed group of Internet users, at their own convenience and for little cost. Bezos is making this software routine available to outsiders now, for such applications as podcasting transcription.
Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) gives users access to Amazon's massive data storage capacity for an annual subscription fee. For small businesses worried about buying up to the next level of server capacity, S3 provides a welcome alternative, with its multiple data centers and relatively low cost, says Bezos. Businesses can also take advantage of this same digital network, through Elastic Compute Cloud, to run applications. This -allows for elastic scaling up" of computing tasks, says Bezos. Many organizations need to test for bugs as they take applications to larger scales, and would prefer not to commit new resources if they don't have to. They also may require only intermittent machine time. Amazon's computers stand ready to serve, at 10 cents per CPU hour, and 20 cents per gigabyte of data transferred, says Bezos.
People are excited, says Bezos, -because they see a hint of what the future may be." The reality of taking an idea to a successful product involves lots of obstacles -- what Bezos describes as -undifferentiated, heavy-lifting infrastructure." This -muck" has to be of the highest quality, and often costs an arm and a leg. Amazon's web-scale computing enables users -to get rid of as much of the muck as possible," says Bezos.

About the Speaker(s): In 1994, Jeffrey Bezos founded Amazon.com, Inc., now the leading online retailer, with 59 million active customer accounts and 10 billion dollars in 2006 sales.

Bezos graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1986. After college, Bezos joined FITEL, a high-tech start-up company in New York building a network to conduct international trade. Two years later, Bezos began working for Bankers Trust Company in New York, where he led the development of their computer systems and became the company's youngest vice president in 1990. From 1990 to 1994, Bezos worked for D.E. Shaw & Co where he helped build one of the most technically sophisticated quantitative hedge funds on Wall Street.

Description: Talk about intelligent designs: Jeff Hawkins says he's mapped out the way the human brain works, and has begun to fashion thinking machines to emulate the process. It comes down to Hierarchical Temporal Memory (HTM). Basically, he says, our brains take sensory inputs from the world and build a set of beliefs around the causes of those inputs. "Discovering causes is the pinnacle of what brains do," says Hawkins. But getting good at this kind of "fancy pattern recognition" is something developing humans seem to do effortlessly, and computers only with immense labor. Learning to differentiate a cat and a dog, for instance, doesn't come naturally to a computer. Hawkins layers his machine brains with nodes that make inferences about outside sensory data, and then pass these hunches on up a hierarchy of nodes until a consensus -- a belief -- evolves about the source of the data. The use of "belief propagation techniques", says Hawkins, enables an entire system to reach the best overall consensus swiftly. As the thinking machine develops common representations of objects or ideas, it can generalize about new data coming at it, and learn to attend only to information that matters.

When Hawkins presented an HTM vision system with primitive line drawings of a helicopter and a mug, the system learned to identify them, even when their orientations changed dramatically, and when the lines were blurred. But the program also correctly rejected chopped-up versions of the same drawings as nonsense. "Stable beliefs at the top lead to changing predictions and behavior at the bottom," says Hawkins. Where does this lead? Possibly to "machines that are much smarter than humans," says Hawkins, computers whose abilities extend beyond sense biology and provide a means to expand such complex fields as weather, cosmology and genetics.

About the Speaker(s): Jeff Hawkins is the architect of many computer products, including the PalmPilot and Treo handheld computers. At Numenta he is developing technology derived from the brain model described in his book On Intelligence. Numenta's technology is a new type of memory architecture modeled after the mammalian cortex that can solve problems in pattern recognition and machine learning.
In addition to his positions at Numenta and Palm, Mr. Hawkins is a member of the scientific board of directors at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Hawkins was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. He earned his B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University in 1979.

Description: If you have ever wondered what it means for a website to become "Akamaized," this lecture about the company's origins explains much of the mystery. But before there was an Akamai, there were research problems lots of them. Nearly 15 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, architect of the World Wide Web, asked Tom Leighton to think about solutions to future -- and now familiar-- Internet issues: bottlenecks that form when users flood to a particular site, often along a single Internet supply line. Leighton's team generated algorithms (and publications and advanced degrees) while figuring out the fastest means to move information from here to there. Along the way, they learned some tricks to outsmart Internet service providers who slow traffic down by bumping competitors' data from their network lines. Akamai (which means clever and cool in Hawaiian) got its start in the MIT 50k competition, and took off when some big name clients decided to give the company a trial run. Paramount, ESPN, Apple, and Microsoft recognized the importance of Akamai's Internet optimization strategy: distributing servers and routing software to the "edge" or end users, rather than centralizing services. Akamai survived the stock market "bubble" and collapse, and now serves a diverse global market.

About the Speaker(s): Tom Leighton has published more 100 research papers in the areas of parallel algorithms and architectures, distributed computing, communication protocols for networks, combinatorial optimization, probabilistic methods, VLSI computation and design, sequential algorithms, and graph theory. He is also the author of two books, including a leading text on parallel algorithms and architectures.
Leighton holds numerous patents involving algorithms for networks, cryptography, and digital rights management -- many of which have been licensed or sold to major corporations.
Tom Leighton received a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University in 1978, and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from MIT in 1981. Leighton was a Bantrell Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) from 1981 to 1983, and he joined the MIT faculty in Applied Mathematics in 1982.
He recently began a two-year appointment to the President's Information Technology Advisory Council. Most recently, he has been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Description: When disciplines converge, innovation results. To prove the point, two inventers offered rich and varied examples from their respective areas: artificial intelligence and biomedicine. Rodney Brooks describes robots exploring dangerous bunkers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and intelligent prosthetic limbs. He predicts that in a few decades, helper robots will be as prevalent as computers are today. Aging baby boomers, says Brooks, will insist on remaining in their own homes as long as possible. They'll require high tech caretaking, as well as entertainment and education opportunities. Brooks believes that low-paid assisted living jobs, as well as agricultural and manufacturing work, will gradually migrate to smart machines. Robert Langer has a string of remarkable biomedical inventions to his credit. He tells us that not so long ago, sausage casing was used for dialysis tubing and mattress stuffing for breast implants. Langer turned the medical world on its head by creating new materials for clinical application: chemical compounds for skin grafts and for targeted cancer therapy. He has created an artificial scaffold for tissues and organs that may also help rebuild spinal cords. The latest research involves microchips that can deliver precise doses of drugs, and respond by remote control like a garage door opener.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Edward Roberts co-founded and directed for nearly two decades the mid-career MIT Management of Technology Program. His "Entrepreneurs in High Technology: Lessons from MIT and Beyond" (Oxford University Press, 1991) won the Association of American Publishers Award for Outstanding Book in Business and Management. He is actively involved as a co-founder, board member, and angel investor in many high-tech startups.

In addition to his multiple roles at MIT, Rodney Brooks is Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. Dr. Brooks is a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Robert Langer has more than 500 issued or pending patents worldwide. In 2002, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers, from the National Academy of Engineering. Among numerous other awards Langer has received are the Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003), the John Fritz Award (2003) (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright) and the General Motors Kettering Award for Cancer Research (2004). Dr. Langer is one of very few people ever elected to all three U.S. National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) ever to receive this distinction.

About the Speaker(s): Edward Roberts co-founded and directed for nearly two decades the mid-career MIT Management of Technology Program. His "Entrepreneurs in High Technology: Lessons from MIT and Beyond" (Oxford University Press, 1991) won the Association of American Publishers Award for Outstanding Book in Business and Management. He is actively involved as a co-founder, board member, and angel investor in many high-tech startups.
In addition to his multiple roles at MIT, Rodney Brooks is Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. Dr. Brooks is a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
Robert Langer has more than 500 issued or pending patents worldwide. In 2002, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers, from the National Academy of Engineering. Among numerous other awards Langer has received are the Heinz Award for Technology, Economy and Employment (2003), the John Fritz Award (2003) (given previously to inventors such as Thomas Edison and Orville Wright) and the General Motors Kettering Award for Cancer Research (2004). Dr. Langer is one of very few people ever elected to all three U.S. National Academies and the youngest in history (at age 43) ever to receive this distinction.

Description: f you feel inseparable from your laptop and cell phone today, just wait a few years: the connection between people and machines is about to get much, much closer. This theme underlay much of the panel discussion. Victor Zue's computers can take subtle visual and conversational cues from a speaker, and respond appropriately (even switching languages at the drop of a hat!). Leslie Pack Kaelbling described the perfect office mate, the "Enduring Personal Cognitive Assistant," which will someday remind you to press forward on a neglected project or to soothe the ruffled feathers of a snubbed colleague. Martin Schmidt's lab is finding ways to plug the tiniest circuitry into a boot or a sneaker to harvest the body's energy for lightweight battery power out in the field. And Rodney Brooks showcased Kismet, a robot who can babble like an appreciative baby and bat her eyes in response to compliments. He also showed a remarkable video of another invention: a prosthetic leg that understands how it's being walked on and adapts. As a woman tries the leg out for the first time, she laughs with sheer delight.

Host(s): School of Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Description: In Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, Howard Rheingold ponders the next great techno-cultural shift as it plays out in a global society. The coming wave, says Rheingold, is the result of super-efficient mobile communications that will allow us to connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime. Applying insights from sociology, artificial intelligence, engineering, and anthropology, Rheingold offers a penetrating perspective on this brave new convergence of pop culture, cutting-edge technology, and social activism, and at the same time, emphasizes that the real impact of mobile communications will come not from the technology itself but from how people use it.

About the Speaker(s): Howard Rheingold is a noted writer and one of the world's foremost authorities on the social implications of technology. Over the past twenty years he has traveled around the world, observing and writing about emerging trends in computing, communications, and culture. One of the creators and former founding executive editor of HotWired, he has served as editor of The Whole Earth Review, editor-in-chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog, and on-line host for The Well. His previous books include "The Virtual Community" and "Tools for Thought", both published by The MIT Press.

Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Libraries

Tape #: T13897]]>
Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:24:16 -0500http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/15830-smart-mobs-the-next-social-revolution
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/15830-smart-mobs-the-next-social-revolution
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
MIT World — special events and lectures MIT Intelligent Wheelchair Project: A Voice-Commandable Robotic Wheelchair
For more information, visit http://rvsn.csail.mit.edu/wheelchair.
New engineering developments offer opportunities to develop assistive technology that can improve the lives of many people who use wheelchairs. In our work, we are designing tomorrow's intelligent wheelchairs: we are developing a voice-commandable intelligent wheelchair that is aware of its surroundings so that it can assist its user in a variety of tasks.

The goal of this smart wheelchair project is to enhance an ordinary powered wheelchair using sensors to perceive the wheelchair's surroundings, a speech interface to interpret commands, a wireless device for room-level location determination, and motor-control software to effect the wheelchair's motion.

The robotic wheelchair learns the layout of its environment (hospital, rehabilitation center, home, etc.) through a narrated, guided tour given by the user or the user's caregivers. Subsequently, the wheelchair can move to any previously-named location under voice command (e.g., "Take me to the cafeteria"). This technology is appropriate for people who have lost mobility due to brain injury or the loss of limbs, but who retain speech. The technology can also enhance safety for users who use ordinary joystick-controlled powered wheelchairs, by preventing collisions with walls, fixed objects, furniture and other people.

We envision that a voice-commandable wheelchair could improve the quality of life and safety of tens of thousands of users. Moreover, considerable health improvements and cost savings could accrue through the reduction or elimination of collision-induced injuries such as wounds and broken limbs. We are currently working closely with at The Boston Home, a specialized-care residence for adults with multiple sclerosis and other progressive neurological conditions. Our efforts are inspired and motivated by the insights, feedback, and needs of The Boston Home's residents, staff, and family members.

Our team of faculty, students, and researchers come from several departments (Aeronautics and Astronautics; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Engineering Systems Division) and laboratories (the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the MIT AgeLab) from across MIT. Our efforts in developing this intelligent wheelchair span multiple domains, including robotics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, human computer interaction and user interface design, speech recognition systems, and the role of technology for people with disabilities and people who are getting older.

Dearth is a research tool designed to help us understand the strengths and weaknesses of Markov Decision Problem solvers for implementing game artificial intelligence, specifically for side-kick characters. The goal is to develop character behaviors automatically, based on a description of the game rules, instead of a programmer-generated set of behaviors. The human-human game mode serves as a testbed for future research, presenting increasingly difficult challenges to the MDP solver.

Over 6 weeks, beginning, Monday Oct. 5th, the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab blog will be hosting a game of the week extravaganza, highlighting each of our 6 summer prototypes for a week at a time. This week's game is DEARTH. The Game of the Week content can be explored at http://gambit.mit.edu/updates/gotw/. We will be posting behind the scenes coverage of our design process, including video, postmortems, concept art, music, early design documentation, commentary from scholars and press, and much more. We hope that by exposing our process to the public, we can encourage innovation in game development and game studies, for industry and academia alike. Come and play. We have made some games for you!

Video Produced by Generoso Fierro, Edited by Garrett Beazley, Post Production Sound by Abe Stein.

]]>
Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:34:52 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/4193-gambit-gotw-podcast-3-dearth
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/4193-gambit-gotw-podcast-3-dearth
GAMBIT GOTW Podcast 3: Dearth
Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab The Center for Collective IntelligenceFri, 16 Oct 2009 15:06:06 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/4172-the-center-for-collective-intelligence
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/4172-the-center-for-collective-intelligence
The Center for Collective Intelligence
MIT Museum The Climate CollaboratoriumFri, 16 Oct 2009 15:05:01 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/4171-the-climate-collaboratorium
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/4171-the-climate-collaboratorium
The Climate Collaboratorium
MIT Museum What is an Engineer?Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:16:36 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/2537-what-is-an-engineer
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/2537-what-is-an-engineer
What is an Engineer?
Touchscreen videos Report from Wikimania 2006: The Wikipedia GameWed, 17 Sep 2008 18:15:42 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/744-report-from-wikimania-2006-the-wikipedia-game
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/744-report-from-wikimania-2006-the-wikipedia-game
Report from Wikimania 2006: The Wikipedia Game
Wikipedia Report from Wikimania 2006: Wikipedia is PeopleWed, 17 Sep 2008 12:37:31 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/690-report-from-wikimania-2006-wikipedia-is-people
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/690-report-from-wikimania-2006-wikipedia-is-people
Report from Wikimania 2006: Wikipedia is People
Wikipedia Report from Wikimania 2006: What is a wiki?Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:08:48 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/805-report-from-wikimania-2006-what-is-a-wiki
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/805-report-from-wikimania-2006-what-is-a-wiki
Report from Wikimania 2006: What is a wiki?
Wikipedia Report from Wikimania 2006: Where did this come from?Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:02:35 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/463-report-from-wikimania-2006-where-did-this-come-from
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/463-report-from-wikimania-2006-where-did-this-come-from
Report from Wikimania 2006: Where did this come from?
Wikipedia Report from Wikimania 2006: The Spread of KnowledgeMon, 15 Sep 2008 12:57:43 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/563-report-from-wikimania-2006-the-spread-of-knowledge
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/563-report-from-wikimania-2006-the-spread-of-knowledge
Report from Wikimania 2006: The Spread of Knowledge
Wikipedia Creative Brain Trust!Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:36:05 -0500http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/627-creative-brain-trust
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/627-creative-brain-trust
Creative Brain Trust!
Comic Book Artists James McLurkinTue, 07 Aug 2007 19:45:13 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/39-james-mclurkin
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/39-james-mclurkin
James McLurkin
msrp2007 Kismet
Building a sociable machine, she believes, is also key to building a smarter machine. Most current robots are programmed to be very good at a specific task, such as navigating a room, but they can't do much more. "Can we build a much more open-ended learning system?" Dr. Breazeal asks. "I'm building a robot that can use the social structure that people already use to help each other learn. If we can build a robot that can tap into that system, then we might not have to program every piece of its behavior."
]]>
Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:06:01 -0400http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/524-kismet
http://ttv.mit.edu/videos/524-kismet
Kismet
MIT Video Productions